How to Get More Out of Every Trip You Take

I’ve Done Enough Trips to Know What Works

I’ve been lucky enough to travel a fair bit. The UK, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Portland, New York, and most corners of Australia worth wandering into. Some trips were planned to within an inch of their lives. Some were thrown together in a panic. Some were solo. Some weren’t. What they’ve all done is teach me something about how I actually want to travel, which is a very different thing to how I thought I wanted to travel when I first started.

Because here’s what nobody tells you. Travel is a skill. It’s not just showing up at an airport with a passport and a good attitude. It’s knowing what to plan and what to leave loose. It’s knowing when to spend the money and when to walk. It’s knowing the difference between a meaningful day and an exhausting one, and choosing the meaningful one even when it feels less productive. You don’t arrive knowing this stuff. You learn it by getting it wrong, multiple times, in multiple time zones.

So this is less a travel diary and more the things I wish someone had told me before I started. The lessons I’ve collected from years of trips, good ones, average ones, and the ones where I came home needing a holiday from my holiday. Intentional travel isn’t about being precious or aesthetic or pretending you’re some seasoned wanderer with a battered notebook. It’s just about making the time count. Because trips are expensive, time off is rare, and you deserve to come home with more than sore feet and a camera roll you’ll never scroll through again.

Skip the Tourist Traps Without Skipping the Country

Here’s where I’m going to be slightly controversial. You do not need to see every famous thing. I’ll wait while you process that. The Mona Lisa is the size of a placemat and surrounded by 400 people holding their phones above their heads like they’re charging a sacred relic. The Hollywood sign is a sign. Times Square smells like hot rubbish and broken dreams. I said what I said.

The tourist trap industrial complex relies on you feeling like you’ve failed if you don’t visit the thing. So you queue for two hours, you spend twenty euros, you take a photo that looks identical to every other photo ever taken in that spot, and you leave feeling oddly empty. Because deep down, you knew the experience was going to be average. You did it for the receipt, not the moment. And there’s a difference between seeing something iconic because you genuinely want to and seeing it because you’re scared of being judged for not seeing it.

The trick is to pick one or two big things you actually care about and let the rest go. In Vienna, I went to one gallery. One. I sat with the paintings I loved. I came back the next day to look at one of them again. That afternoon meant more to me than the eight museums I dragged myself through in Berlin trying to be cultured. You’re allowed to ignore the famous stuff. You’re allowed to spend a Tuesday wandering a neighbourhood with no plan. You’re allowed to choose depth over coverage. Nobody’s marking you.

Eat the Food. Then Eat More of the Food.

This is non-negotiable. If you go to Paris and eat at a chain you have at home, I will personally come to your house and confiscate your passport. I’m joking. Mostly. But the fastest way to actually experience a place is through what its people eat every single day, in the spots they go to when no one’s watching.

Avoid the restaurants with menus in six languages and a man outside trying to wave you in. That’s not dinner, that’s a hostage situation with overpriced pasta. Walk an extra ten minutes. Find the place with no English menu, three tables, and a woman who’s clearly been running the kitchen since the eighties. Order the thing you can’t pronounce. Trust her. In Paris I stumbled into a tiny corner café and ordered a salad I still dream about to this day. I’ve tried to recreate it more times than I’ll admit, and I can’t, because the cheese only exists in Adelaide of all places, and even then it’s not quite the same. In Berlin, the best meal I had was a currywurst from a stand near a train station, eaten standing up, in the rain, while a stranger’s dog stared at me with mild interest.

Local food isn’t just about flavour. It’s about understanding how people live. What they eat for breakfast. How long lunch takes. Whether dinner is a social marathon or a quick affair. You learn more about a culture standing in a bakery at 7am than you do in most museums. So eat the weird thing. Drink what the locals drink. If everyone around you is having a small glass of something at 11am, congratulations, you’re now part of the local economy. Sit down. Participate. The calories don’t count overseas. I don’t make the rules.

Learn Some of the Language, Even Badly

I cannot tell you how much it changes a trip when you walk into a shop and say bonjour before launching into English. Not because it’s transactional. Not because it gets you better service, though it absolutely does. But because it’s a tiny act of respect that costs you nothing and shifts the entire dynamic of the interaction. You’re not just a tourist demanding to be accommodated. You’re a guest who showed up with manners.

You don’t have to be fluent. Thankfully I’m genuinely good at languages and pick them up quickly, though I can only listen to them slowly, which means I can order beautifully and then immediately panic when the response comes back at full native speed. But even if you’re not naturally inclined, you can still try. Learn please, thank you, hello, goodbye, sorry, and how to ask for the bill. That’s it. Six phrases. Maybe seven if you’re feeling ambitious enough to attempt do you speak English. And every single time, the response is warmer, the smile is bigger, the recommendation is better. Because you tried. Because you didn’t roll up assuming the entire country would bend itself around your monolingual ego.

The worst thing you can do is the loud English thing. You know the one. Where someone speaks louder and slower in their own language as if volume is going to translate it. Don’t be that person. Be the slightly embarrassing one who mispronounces merci with such enthusiasm that the waiter takes pity on you and brings you an extra pastry. That’s the goal. That’s the energy. Effort lands every single time, even when the pronunciation doesn’t.

Stop Performing the Trip and Actually Have It

The biggest shift in how I travel happened when I stopped curating it for an audience. Not just an online audience, though that’s part of it. The internal audience too. The version of you that’s already imagining how you’ll describe this trip to your colleagues. The one already drafting captions in your head while you stand in front of a fountain. The one ranking the day’s experiences before the day’s even over.

When you’re performing a trip, you can’t actually be on it. You’re too busy documenting, comparing, rehearsing. You miss the way the light hits a building at five in the afternoon. You miss the man playing accordion badly outside a metro station. You miss the conversation you could’ve had with the woman at the next table if you’d put your phone down. The whole point of leaving home is to be somewhere else, and you can’t be somewhere else if you’re mentally still standing in your kitchen narrating the experience to your group chat.

So leave room for nothing. Build entire afternoons with no plan. Sit in a park. Get lost on purpose. Take the wrong train and see where it spits you out. The best memories I have from every trip I’ve taken weren’t the planned things. They were the accidents. The wrong turns. The cafés I ducked into because of rain. The bookshop I found because I couldn’t read the street signs and ended up three suburbs over. Travel rewards the people who show up curious, not the ones who show up with a schedule.

You don’t need to come back with a hundred photos and a list of accomplishments. You need to come back slightly altered. Quietly different. Carrying something with you that you didn’t have before, whether that’s a new favourite food, a phrase that makes you laugh, or simply the memory of an afternoon where you weren’t anyone’s problem. That’s intentional travel. Not the itinerary. Not the bucket list. Just the decision to be where your feet are, while your feet are lucky enough to be somewhere new.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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